I’m going to let you in on a not so little secret within the supplement industry. Supplement brands are competing for every dollar from consumers who have a heightened sensitivity to costs, but the supplement consumer has proved once again that it’s highly resilient. And while the level of investment funding and quantity of M&A transactions are down this year (compared to the previous few years), things have fared relatively well for the supplement industry. The markets are rightsizing, lofty valuations are getting washed out of the system, and companies are getting used to higher interest rates. Combine that with the significant capital now sidelined on the private equity side and stockpiles of cash at strategics waiting for deployment…and I believe things could be improving on the finance deal side of the supplement industry in the near-term future. Does that mean everything is heading right back to the dozen or so years of Goldilocks between the Great Recession and the Great Shutdown? No…investors have gotten more careful, and there’s less FOMO. Money isn’t free anymore…and I don’t believe it will get significantly cheaper anytime soon as the Federal Reserve will face challenges stemming from wage inflation battles within the labor movement 2.0. So, investors must recalibrate, but deals will indeed keep getting done. Though I believe the supplement industry investment theme over the next few years will be coined “getting back to the basics!” And that phrase can obviously mean many different things to many different people, but I’m thinking about it through a synergistic lens. Let’s look at a trio of supplement industry deals that were announced in the last few weeks: Nutra Holdings acquired Nested Naturals, Thorne HealthTech was acquired by the global private equity firm L Catterton, and the final recent “back to the basics” synergistic supplement industry deal I wanted to bring to your attention is between OBVI and the coffee brand Coffee Over Cardio. But instead of me just babbling on about this M&A transaction, I asked my good friend Ronak Shah (Co-Founder and CEO of OBVI) to join me for a quick chat on camera. In that conversation, we run though the backstory on how the deal materialized, the investment thesis, and what’s next on the deal horizon for OBVI.

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